The CEO of one of America's legacy "Big Three" automakers was shaken to his core during an electric vehicle teardown, Business Insider reported, but the ordeal only seemed to solidify his vision.
Jim Farley is the CEO of Ford, a brand whose identity is rooted in American manufacturing and ingenuity. Ford began its foray into EVs in earnest around 2020, but some recent hands-on competitive analysis seemed to rattle Farley.
Farley addressed Ford's experience with rival automakers' EVs during an episode of the podcast Office Hours: Business Edition, scheduled to air on Nov. 12. (A teaser was released ahead of the broadcast.)
According to Farley, Ford got its hands on a Tesla Model 3 and several unnamed Chinese EVs, and set about disassembling the vehicles — a common automotive industry practice — to gain insight into cutting-edge EV technology, as Xiaomi did with the Model Y.
To hear Farley tell it, visions of buggy whips were dancing in his head as Ford witnessed firsthand how innovative EVs had become, and he spoke candidly about the moment.
"I was very humbled when we took apart the first Model 3 Tesla and started to take apart the Chinese vehicles. When we took them apart, it was shocking what we found," Farley recalled.
As Business Insider observed, American automakers like Ford have had to contend with recent, abrupt policy reversals in the United States.
The sudden reversal of a federal EV tax credit forced them to not only reassess their short-term EV plans but also to absorb gargantuan losses. General Motors, another Big Three automaker, took a $1.6 billion hit when subsidies were slashed on short notice.
Arguably, the policy change was enacted in part to stall EV momentum domestically, but Farley's view was good news for the environment — and Americans interested in making their next car an EV.
Farley was clear-eyed about what a shift in federal priorities meant in terms of losses, and Ford remained all-in on EVs.
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No way 👎 "I knew it was going to be brutal business-wise," he admitted.
But Ford's EV teardowns only further convinced him that electrification is unequivocally the future of auto tech, and it sounded as if Farley viewed policy headwinds as a blip in the march to an electric future.
"My ethos is, take on the hardest problems as fast as you can and do it sometimes in public because you'll solve them quicker that way," Farley resolved.
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